This week scientists reported that the Aegean volcano at Santorini (ancient Thera) is filling an underwater chamber with magma, spurring worries that the volcano might erupt again. The Santorini volcano is most famous for the eruption that took place around 1620 BCE. That eruption was among the most powerful in the recent geologic history of the earth and has been blamed by alternative theorists for everything from the collapse of Minoan Crete to the ten plagues of Biblical Egypt.

In the news coverage of the volcano’s magma, reporters have been quick to link Santorini with the Plato’s myth of Atlantis. The Christian Science Monitor’s coverage is typical:

There has been much speculation as to whether the Santorini eruption inspired the legend of Atlantis, which Plato said drowned in the ocean. Although some experts think the legend of Atlantis was just invented, others say the explosion might have given rise to the tale of a lost empire by helping to wipe out the real-life Minoan civilization that once thrived in the Mediterranean.

This claim has been the basis for countless Atlantis books, documentaries, and websites. In the past few years both 1421 author Gavin Menzies and independent writer Rodney Castleden have put out books claiming that the Minoans were Atlantis, and that the Thera eruption was Plato’s single-night cataclysm destroying the island empire. I have had trouble with this claim for a long time. It just doesn’t make sense to me. Even setting aside the obvious problem of how Plato would learn about an event that no ancient historians—Greek or Egyptian—between 1600 BCE and 300 BCE made reference to, we have a chronological problem. The eruption at Thera took place around 1620 BCE, but the Minoans soldiered on for two centuries after this. (Only 5 mm of ash fell on Crete itself, not enough to destroy the civilization.) In fact, following 1600 BCE, the Minoan palaces actually increased in size. Minoan civilization continued on until the Mycenaeans invaded around 1420 BCE and took over the island. Much of what had been Minoan continued on under the new rulers, down to the end of Mycenaean civilization in 1200-1100 BCE. This just doesn’t sound like the Apocalypse to me. While Santorini was undoubtedly destroyed by the volcano, there is little evidence that the island was, frankly, important enough to have lingered in the historical memory of the faraway mainland Greeks, or even the Egyptians, for 1,300 years. The larger Minoan civilization didn’t fall, and the whole theory of a Minoan Atlantis just doesn’t work out chronologically. Worse, since the Egyptians and the mainland Greeks both knew who the Minoans were (the Egyptians traded with them), it seems difficult to imagine that they somehow turned them into a second, unrelated civilization (Atlantis) while also maintaining memories of Minoan Crete, as evidenced by the Daedalus and Minotaur myths. I think the answer is fairly simply: Like Euhemerus’s contemporary fantasy island of Panchaea, Atlantis is simply the product of Plato’s imagination.

All the news coverage of Santorini goes to show is that if an alternative claim is published in a high-profile book and featured in enough documentaries on cable TV, it can exist in a world beyond facts.

Or Plato's date of 9000 years before his own time is highly
accurate and takes one to an epoch that has an extremely
old Turkish city with SPHYNX carvings in it that are clever.
The Minoans are a much later people, we are talking of the
tyme when Doggerland was part of a peninsula and not just
near today's English Channel. The searching for ancestral
roots prior to the Neolithic Revolution is at the core of this.
If I am correct, the myth of Oedipus dates back to that old
wise Atlantean time & is easily 5000 years old as the Bent
Pyramid becomes less in an alignment. Jason, you bait long
dead Plato in a manner not unlike Aristotle. Seriously... yes.
I just went into my hydra~theory, but I am not a hypocrite, i
do know i blundered into a pattern that normally keeps up
the illusion of a "hot" website, but your readers are drawn to
the arcane and eclectic. not the tawdry usual. i may be too
free!form or EGO driven or abstract or lazy or direct. I looked!
its not 3 people pretending to be 30 so as to churn up traffic.

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J.A. Dickey

5/2/2014 10:00:06 pm

Plato had placed Solon's information in the context of an age
9000 years earlier. Its not the island 70 miles from Crete and
near to that bronze and iron interface, an almost Hyksos or
Hittite date. This is not Thomas Edward Lawrence's excursion
before the Great War and what he learned. Plato does hand us
a lore but he is more academically exacting than was Pythagoras.

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J.A. Dickey

5/2/2014 10:08:08 pm

Jason, thy HYDRA is perhaps not lurking INSIDE thy admin
level, and if you want to, despite an almost FORTRAN root
directory, you can utilize "wobbly" Weebly to lift the snarky
and singular beastie up. In one instant, 2000 names are then
revealed, the cyber equivilent of a Labor by Hercules. Gunn
and the "REV" are older, possibly twice thy age, but they too
are hit by the pattern. its more obvious on the quiet threads.
I am going to pull back into lurker mode so as not to bait the
beastie. In time you will know i am correct about the Bigfoot
DNA. the "V" shaped stone walls found under the water when
not a hunter's blind are close to almost getting into a fort formation.
this was in yesterday's news, hence those Great Lakes copper
mines are ancient but small, as is Cornwall's tin mines in the U.K!

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J.A Dickey

5/2/2014 10:12:28 pm

Here you are wrong...

"Atlantis theorists often claim that Plato's fictional creation must have been real because Plato's dialogues sound like history. They argue that the ancients were not capable of fabricating history or employing their imagination. Euhemerus' Panchaea, a fictive utopian island kingdom almost coeval with Plato's composition, poses great difficulties for this view.

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J.A Dickey

5/2/2014 10:24:30 pm

A more thorough look at Neo-Platonism, Plotinus, D.C Longinus
and the sacking of both Augustine's Rome + DCL's PALMYRA
by comparison to Corinth + Carthage by Cato the Censor inspired
Republican Romans tends to indirectly ground Plato pragmatically.
He often does not let one sully the realm of abstraction. To whit,
I think D.C Longinus understood PRECISELY how Plato defined his own forms. This is like saying Wittgenstein kept to Goethe's and
Kant's linguistic creations but Kierkegaard was to creative and
Satre too remote and contemporary. All Constantine the Great
did is revive Augustus's imperial apparatus and dismantle Jove
worship as by a Trojan definition. Magick books didst change but
both Patrick of Ireland and Claudius II's grandson anticipated the
analysis of Aquinas. a new Thesarus, a new archetype set, i feel.
illogical, almost Romantic era & almost defining by an ignorance.
inside DCL's Sublime is Trojan hints at Plato'sforms. i beeMedieval

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.

5/2/2014 10:29:49 pm

it is late Herr "K" was TOO creative, but he did create
[not 'to creative' and] (aurelius =/= aurelian)

SARTRE =satre=satire DCL is beheaded in front of Aurelian.

PLATO's ATLANTIS= real DCL is the last precise Platonist.

.

5/2/2014 10:32:11 pm

Magick = Crowley's word
you either aim back and magnify
heXXXes or you bury or hyde
auld spellbooks. Helena's son hid
AUGUSTUS's spellbooks!!!!!!!

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ClaudiusTHAH2nd's grandson thought he was the last truly Roman Pontifex Maximus of Jove by Augustus's rules...

5/2/2014 10:37:36 pm

GOTO i.Newton on Scythians + stYrrups + the book of DAn'L

why didst the uncle of "J" half humour Newton's trinity and
i do not opine on modern physics at this moment at all. here.

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@vGv$TvS

5/2/2014 10:41:51 pm

have you gotten to the illogic of a.d 124o A's FIVE WAYs?

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.

5/2/2014 10:42:32 pm

ten if the zero is dropped sends one to ONE again.

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About Me

I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.